Filed under: notes
Most places I can think of (parks, churches, businesses) are workplaces for someone. And I’ve been researching workplace violence in terms of the recent church shooting in Knoxville, and came across this table of types of workplace violence from Workplace Prevention Prevention Strategies.
|
Table 1. Typology of workplace violence |
|
|
Type |
Description |
|---|---|
| I: Criminal intent | The perpetrator has no legitimate relationship to the business or its employee, and is usually committing a crime in conjunction with the violence. These crimes can include robbery, shoplifting, trespassing, and terrorism. The vast majority of workplace homicides (85%) fall into this category. |
| II: Customer/client | The perpetrator has a legitimate relationship with the business and becomes violent while being served by the business. This category includes customers, clients, patients, students, inmates, and any other group for which the business provides services. It is believed that a large portion of customer/client incidents occur in the health care industry, in settings such as nursing homes or psychiatric facilities; the victims are often patient caregivers. Police officers, prison staff, flight attendants, and teachers are some other examples of workers who may be exposed to this kind of WPV, which accounts for approximately 3% of all workplace homicides. |
| III: Worker-on-worker | The perpetrator is an employee or past employee of the business who attacks or threatens another employee(s) or past employee(s) in the workplace. Worker-on-worker fatalities account for approximately 7% of all workplace homicides. |
| IV: Personal relationship | The perpetrator usually does not have a relationship with the business but has a personal relationship with the intended victim. This category includes victims of domestic violence assaulted or threatened while at work, and accounts for about 5% of all workplace homicides. |
| Sources: CAL/OSHA 1995; Howard 1996; IPRC 2001. | |
It seems like from what I’ve read the Knoxville shooting is a combination of Criminal intent (domestic terrorism) as well as a Personal relationship (with his ex-wife’s church). For some reason, when I think of workplace violence, I tend to think of worker-on-worker violence, but you can see that this is really only 7% of workplace homicides while 85% involve a perpetrator with no relationship to the business. Scary to think how random that is.
And, from a directly proportional standpoint, with more people on earth, will come more events like this, sad to say.
Comment by Comrade Kevin 07.29.08 @ 6:29 pmLeave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>